Week One

We've finished our first week of homeschooling and have had a great week. C, doing Exploring Countries and Cultures (ECC), is learning how to read maps and is learning an overview of Earth's geography. We read a book about a missionary family living in Papau New Guini (near Australia) for thirty years so that they could translate the Bible into the language there since the people didn't have a Bible in their language. There are many languages in the world that do not have a Bible written in their language. My Father's World uses part of their profits for Bible translation. We will be learning about a lot of missionaries this year.

Christopher loves all things map related so is enjoying learning more about them and coloring in his world maps and labeling continents and oceans. We drew the continents on an tangerine and then peeled it to see how hard it is to make a flat map out of a round world.

Christopher's doing great with cursive and I think it's his favorite thing to do. When he went to public school in K and 1st grade, he always said his favorite subject was handwriting also.

His memory verse this week was John 3:16.

For a science activity, he had to rope off a square yard of the backyard and record what was in his habitat.

Matthew is loving first grade and asks to work ahead in his handwriting workbook everyday. I let him today and I might let him work ahead a bit since his work is pretty light right now. Plus, we'd get more done before the baby comes.

M is learning about the history of the Bible and he is making handwriting pages to turn into a scroll just like the Bible was first handwritten onto scrolls. All of the boys helped to make clay to make jars out of which is what people would store their scrolls in.

M also learned that the Jewish calendar is different than ours and he made one.

G did a lot of the things that the older boys did. C had to fill out a (pretend) application for a passport so I let the other boys also do one. When I told G that he'd get the actual passport in a few weeks, he broke down crying and I ended up giving his application back to him so he wouldn't be empty handed.